Comment by davydm

Webpack is really powerful, however, it's a huge generalist, and I think the specializing tools are showing their speed. In addition, webpack has suffered the same unnecessary churn that a lot of J's projects do, where upgrades become incredibly difficult due to arbitrary changes without (easily implementable) backwards compatibility. The cheese moved, but to little or no benefit for the consumer. Ask me - I've been trying to upgrade a vue2/webpack4 project to vue3/webpack5 for a long time but can never get far enough - always hit a wall. I've been looking at ways to move to vite specifically because of this, and I thought I was blocked by some rather deep integration into webpack which facilitates building branded versions of our white label app, but I think I see a way with vite.

Webpack honestly needs official, guided tooling configurators. Documentation often mentions a block of code, but not exactly _where_ to put it. AI agents are apparently stumped by a 4-5 upgrade, documentation lets me down, no automated upgrade tooling, and a lot of the changes I've seen are just cheese movement - add nothing useful, but require upgrade maintenance.

If webpack wants to take the top spot again, they need to work on: - performance: this is the most obvious issue right now. Webpack builds aren't exactly fast, and the new breed of tooling, esp vite, blows webpack away - consistent api: stop moving cheese arbitrarily, or, if you have to change things, provide backwards compatibility shims or upgrade tooling - improvements to documentation: it should be so hard to figure out where suggested config blocks of code should go - providing real examples would help